Peter Tosh symposium for UWI tomorrow

A symposium to commemorate the birthday of Reggae star Peter Tosh is set for The University of the West Indies, Mona tomorrow evening.

Entitled, Peter Tosh — The Man, the Music and the Message: Celebrating the Life and the Legacy of a True Musical Icon, the symposium is scheduled to feature panellists Copeland Forbes — former manager for Peter Tosh, musicologist, painter, and lecturer in the Department of Government, Dr Clinton Hutton and Ras Miguel Lorne, musicologist, attorney at law, and President of the Marcus Garvey People's Political Party.

There will also be a special preview of a forthcoming documentary on Tosh — Peter Uppa Pan Top — directed by Kereen Karim. This biography paints a picture of Peter Tosh as a child, and then as a man through his mother's eyes. In a rare interview with his mother, Alvira Coke, now 94 and still living in Peter's birthplace, Belmont, in Westmoreland, the director is said to provide a rare and revealing glimpse into the musical icon's childhood.

According to the organisers, Copeland Forbes intends to focus on Peter and his trips to Africa where he went on the first occasion in 1982 to seek medical help from a bush doctor. It is said that Forbes will provide considerable detail of the 1982 trip wherein both he and Peter went to Nigeria at the invitation of Nigerian Artist Sonny Okosun who was their host.

Dr Clinton Hutton intends to focus on the Rude Boy phenomenon that peaked in Jamaica during the 1960s and its impact on the popular Jamaican music industry of that time. The debate that still enshrouds this pivotal period in Jamaican music history was whether the recording artists of that time were complicit in the spread and popularising of the Rude boy Phenomenon in the dungles of Kingston, in terms of the Rude Boy inspired songs that they wrote and performed, or whether their lyrics and music actively opposed the phenomenon.

Ras Miguel Lorne, it has been explained, will consider the unique chemistry that kept all three of the original Wailers, Bunny, Bob and Peter together as a group and as a productive unit for some ten years before they met Chris Blackwell and shot to worldwide attention in 1972.

Source jamaicaobserver